3 ms·
So more options are bad, because people might make choices that they don't understand? Is this the invisible hand of the market that people have been wanging on
by atoav 3y ago
So more options are bad, because people might make choices that they don't understand? Is this the invisible hand of the market that people have been wanging on about for the past dekades?
Or is this new-found worry about people choosing wrong things something that is only limited to Apple? Because I could imagine other, worse markets with much more impact on people that are less regulated (e.g. food).
- dash2 3y agoFood is highly regulated by the state, at least in the US and EU (probably too highly regulated). It is also a market with numerous platforms which compete to offer quality guarantees - i.e. supermarkets. The difference with Apple is just that the platform is more tied in to the hardware.
- atoav 3y agoSure, but would you like one company to decide which food you are allowed to eat?
- jjgreen 3y ago... it's made out of people!
- dash2 3y agoI understand the loss of being stuck with a single platform, but that's not quite right. You can have multiple devices, just as you can shop at multiple supermarkets. It's just that the price for doing so is higher (syncing multiple devices, carrying them around, the initial outlay), so most people don't. Nobody forces you to buy either Apple or Android. But the services they provide are indeed valuable: the walled garden protects me from certain kinds of harmful software, for example. The duopoly in smartphones is an outcome of the underlying technologies. That doesn't mean it is efficient in the economic sense, compared to an ideal world, but the comparison has to be what we can actually implement.